Inel Begins Cleanup Of Nuke Waste In ‘Pit 9’

Workers at the Idaho Nuclear Engineering Laboratory are setting out to undo the damage from three decades of nuclear waste dumping at “Pit 9.”

It is a $264 million gamble for the Department of Energy: Erecting tracks and buildings from which robots can excavate, package and process its 150,000 cubic feet of radioactive-contaminated wastes.

Much of the waste is in barrels that are rusting away.

If the experiment works, the process will be applied to other pits at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory and at other sites where nuclear waste has been buried. Estimates on the cost of the job nationwide run to half a trillion dollars.

But no one knows how big the problem is - DOE discovers new sites all the time - and by the absence of the technologies needed to even do much of the work.

Pit 9 is the ninth of 20 pits in the site’s Subsurface Disposal Area. Together they over 97 acres of ground at the facility, which also stores waste above ground including spent nuclear fuel from Navy ships.

The Idaho National Engineering Laboratory continues to bury some low level wastes, but the department says most will decay into stable compounds within 100 years.

The waste disposed of at Pit 9 is a different matter.

From 1952 through 1970, the site buried substances that remain dangerous for thousands of years.

They went into Pit 9 for two years, from 1967 to 1969. During the last year, spring run off flooded the pit and is believed to have caused some of the waste to percolate through the soil to a depth of about 110 feet.

That puts it about one-fifth of the way down to the underground supply that is one of Idaho’s main sources of drinking water, the Snake River Plain Aquifer.

Now the government is moving toward repackaging its transuranic wastes and storing them above ground in monitored buildings until they can be shipped to another site, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.

Whether the work can be done safely will be known in about a year. Construction workers today are setting up the massive structures where the wastes will be handled.

Long concrete foundations have been poured on opposite ends of the field to support a giant set of metal rails.

Gliding along those rails will be a 150-by-80-foot building containing remote-controlled cranes and equipment. The retrieval structure will excavate soils, separate contaminants and package them.

The building’s filters are designed to stop dust particles from escaping into the atmosphere.

Once packaged, the wastes will be transferred to a nearby treatment center. The center’s three concretewalled cells will shred the clothing and other wastes, chemically extract radioactive contaminants, then heat contaminants to create a solid glass-like substance.

Idaho state officials, who signed a cleanup plan with the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, say they’re satisfied that the Pit 9 cleanup standard will protect the aquifer.